load bearing adverb

he's fairly principled

when is the last time he’s talked about covid or worn a mask at all

My experience is the same. All of my social group has abandoned me and I just don’t have the energy in me to rebuild only to have them abandon me too. It’s just my wife and I at this point, and I don’t know if that will ever change. I wonder if there will ever be a reckoning for this when (not if) COVID comes for all of them too and suddenly they realize they have alienated any of the population that could have ever helped or been there for them. We live in such an ugly world and it was all preventable.

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Pretty much!

Now I am very sorry. I am so used to people talking like you without sincerity, and I can see that was wrong. I worried that I was too aggro to you after I responded so please forgive me. These are really tumultuous times to still care about the dangers of COVID, even in spaces which should know better. We are critical of the state line in every case but this one, apparently...

An FFP2 should be perfectly acceptable, yes, though I am not totally qualified to give advice about them specifically. From what I know they are equivalent to the N95 grade respirators in the states and those can reportedly be used for several days before they're no longer effective, but they need to be stored in a sealed bag or something similar after being opened. I always play it safe with the disposable respirators when I use them and consider them single-use, at most for the rest of the day, but my similarly-cautious roommate does reuse them for a few days in a row and to my knowledge is fine. I am not sure if the similarities between the standards are enough to recommend this, but I do know FFP2/3 is what you want, and ideally ones with straps that go around your head since the seal with ear straps can be weaker and more easily compromised. No gaps for air to come in or out of any part touching your face when you breathe. It will be an adjustment, but your body will get used to the pace of oxygen; I know marathon runners who wear them every day and still perform.

Someone already said it, but...

It is not a difficult proposition to understand, and one people like me have been trying to tell anyone who would listen about for years; none of you listen. COVID spreads via the air we breath and in spaces with elevated CO2 (e.g. indoors) this is especially so, as the same air is recirculating. Whenever you share a space with someone who is not, at minimum, wearing a respirator at any time they are around other people, you are both taking a risk at being infected and becoming a disease vector for others. Asymptomatic infections are more common now than ever, so you may not even know you're sick or feel anything. The best and easiest way to improve the odds for yourself and others not being infected and possibly disabled for life by Long COVID is to avoid doing things in crowded indoor spaces where it can be avoided, and if it really can't be avoided, then everyone should be wearing N95 or better quality respirators anytime they will be around one another. Anything other than this at the bare minimum increases your infection risk, and the risks of everyone around you.

Is this to say that there is absolutely no responsible way to attend any sort of group event

Unless everyone or at least a majority in attendance are on board with mitigations, in the midst of a global pandemic that has not ended, that is correct. Sorry.

Really feeling the call of the abyss lately. How can I have hope for anything when we can't clear the very simple bar of pandemic mitigation? I'm so tired.

without fail

Show

I have plenty of optimism for the world; do not assume this “main character syndrome” of me. I merely live here, and I have no illusions about what’s coming at home. That’s all.

also lol at any of you who say shit like this cos y’all took the mask off back in 21-22 with everyone else I bet, huh? When’s the last time you thought about COVID? Whatever.

I am not going off of vibes, I have been agitating and organizing wherever I’ve lived in this godforsaken place for like 15 years, Americans don’t fucking want this. They want imperialism. I don’t know how long we’ll have to keep doing this for it to really sink in with people who still think there’s hope beyond collapse of empire for this country but I’m through with it until everyone else wants to catch up.

Watch out, they’ll call you a doomer lib for this one

It makes no sense and opposes the current evidence ..

that is par for the course for how this population behaves en masse for the entire time this little place named the United States of America has been around. As far as this 30-something year-old blip on the radar has got something to say about it I’ll believe in cause for revolutionary optimism when I see it, and I ain’t seen it as long as I’ve been alive, at least

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

wait a minute

but the average Kamala voter … are not excited about mass deportations

[citation needed]

We are doing our best to learn nothing

Logging back in from my break — hell of a time to return — just to to tell you this is very felt. I see your posts in the disability community mega. I never liked the "its just online, u can log off" rhetoric because, yeah, you sure can, and I do, but niche forums like this are (usually) more than some meaningless input-output feedback loop and whether we like it or not this is a space of human beings with lives and names we can recognize and that is called socializing, wow! I similarly do not have many means to "touch grass" because the grass touchers keep making the air toxic and doing nothing about it while telling me I'm the fucked up one. Whenever people say this (call me uncharitable, idgaf) I assume they haven't thought about COVID at all since '21 just like everybody else in the backwards goddamn world we live in now and that tells me all I need to know about who I ought to listen to. This old post I made sums up the "just organize" mentality, a thing I have done & attempted much more and for far longer than most here have even been "leftist":

My wife works in this little crappy Chuck E Cheese knockoff arcade downtown- pretty much the worst place to be all things considered, but we don't have any other choice for income and it pays well enough of any minimum wage job we've ever had. She's been there for a year and has never once taken off her N95 indoors or around other people for any of her eight hour shifts (and her combined three hour commute to and from the building). She has been the only one to do so. When she describes to her coworkers, the wonderful working class of the United States, that she does it to protect me, an immunocompromised person in her family, and when she describes the dangers, shows them the data we have surrounding current Covid trends, they will all say "yeah wow that's bad"- and then we offer them a mask from our personal supply of N95s and they go "no thanks" without hesitation, every time. They have mandatory "safety meetings" every few months and we've brought Covid and masking up at every one of them in addition to casual conversations with her coworkers. There is no plan to change policy. There is no plan for them to bother themselves for the sake of others, or even themselves, at any level of the social ladder, institutional or interpersonal. One of her coworkers talked about driving to Seattle a few weeks ago for a concert with someone who tested positive for Covid, but that they weren't worried because "it was probably a false positive". One of her coworkers complains that she started a couple weeks ago and has been sick twice. My wife has been sick that much the entire year she's worked there, because she wears a high-quality and well-fitting respirator at all times.

Last year we wanted to go to an event nearby and asked the organizers of what was planned to be about 40-50 people if they would require masks because I was an immunocompromised person and wanted the best chances to avoid infection as much as possible while still being able to participate. In their messages they sounded sympathetic, assuring me that they would and that those who saw what I said would wear them for me that weekend. We were two of maybe four people in masks there. They didn't do anything for us, and people who said they would mask were not wearing them. So we left.

sure wish I could go volunteer at my Communist Org For Building Communism like you and all your badass friends, except they (and probably you too bitch) are all carrying airborne death and won’t do anything about it. Fuck you.

So, like, yeah, it is just a website. But the real world has fucking abandoned me, and us, and at least I can say Hexbear was a spot where I didn't have to listen to anyone talking about COVID who would also pearl clutch about presinald trunt, or any number of other inane liberal bugbears, if they talk about it at all. It's at the very least a sanity check in times that are simply incomprehensible.

I’m sorry for coming so hard at you specifically, I like you a lot friend owl. You are funny and cheerful and I appreciate that, but I radicalized a lot younger than most people I know of and this is just the reality I have been experiencing for my whole life.

I am always looking for some light at the end of this tunnel, a hopeful answer to give, but I think what’s most likely to happen to empire now would be like what happened to Rome: the population dwindles — due to endless war & mass death, fleeing — until there is nothing left to churn through and things cease to function. Even that is optimistic. I do not put it above this country to blow the world up before that can happen, and regardless of anything else further pandemics are guaranteed as the global population’s immune systems get cumulatively destroyed by endless COVID and other unknown pathogens emerging due to increasing climate disasters altering the environment. Tuberculosis was thought to be, essentially, gone; it is now surging around the country in numbers not seen for something close to the last century. In all cases, the prognosis is still extremely dire to me. I don’t know how one can see what’s happening around them and deny it. We can and should build ad-hoc collectives and communities and extend that influence where we can, but I do not think that power extends beyond this small footprint until the complete and total collapse of empire, and I know that’s not a good answer, but until I find a better one (and I haven’t yet; I really, really am trying) then that is how I predict things playing out. This is the most optimistic thing I can say.

That doesn’t mean do nothing. Like I said, I still fight because I do not know how else to live. But god damn it am I sick of hearing this sentiment from “leftists” whose first taste of anything was Bernard fucking Sanders eight years ago. “Just organize”, “touch grass doomer”, “get involved with your community, lib” ad nauseum.

I mean, you can wear a mask and organise.

Let me tell you how well that’s going, because I actually have done this!

They call me a wrecker. They call me a fed. They tell me COVID is over, it’s just a cold, and I am overreacting. Only sometimes do they say they will accommodate, and then they still don’t. I show up to demonstrations & events I was promised would be “fully masked”, “masking enforced”, and there are no masks on any faces; there is no enforcement of anything. At best, single digit numbers among 40, 50 people, on average for the kinds of things I try to attend. Anything larger? Hell the fuck no they won’t. And this is in one of the most “progressive” cities in the country!

This is a thought-terminating cliche at this point.